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Electric cars are mainstream now. Reusable rockets are real. Twitter won an election and spawned XAI. Elon is the richest man in the world. Yeah bro, he's a moron. Sure.


Tesla was almost bankrupt when Musk went to the Department of Energy Loan Office and said he had an investment from Mercedes to get $465 million dollar loan to save the company. That singular act was why you even hear about Elon today. Without the loan, he would not have gotten the Fremont factory and project WhiteStar would have been dead.

Without that loan, Musk couldn't use his wealth to reinvest into SpaceX and also would have had a damaged reputation and credibility. SpaceX would have survived, but it's development would have been much much slower. You wouldn't have Falcon Heavy and Starlink, and Starship today.

So thank your government folks for creating both the electric vehicle market and private space market! Without the government creating these markets, there would be no richest man Musk today. So thank the ATVM program authored by Senator Stabenow and NASA's COTS program. The point here is to illustrate the huge amount of power the government has to pick winners and losers. That it is the government that creates markets to play in and money to play with.


It's not fair. His dad had a partial stake in an emerald mine!


And later went bankrupt, and not the company bankruptcy kind, the personal bankruptcy kind.




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